Speculative Future Metabolic Architecture

Speculating the implications of a metabolic architecture provides a platform for thinking about a new way of future building. Disaster scenarios such as floods, hurricanes, earthquakes, nuclear fallouts, and others are unavoidable events. Instead of building compressively, meaning building to defend against scenarios such as disasters, the future should include building in the way a natural system behaves, in flux, with material dependencies, and as an output produced from the exchange of materials, reactions, or responses that occur in a metabolism. Architecture must be thought of as an output of a metabolism, an altered input, where this output is unknown and entirely dependent upon metabolic scenarios. To think about architecture in this way, one could view it as generative, stabilizing, opportunistic, and possibly non-human or existing in a post-human landscape.

This speculation is meant to encourage people to reevaluate how architecture should be built, how it should be reactive, and what is the process of architecture. The term “glitch” is used as a provocative renaming of a disaster. If architecture is designed to expect, work with, and productively react or respond to disasters, these disasters would no longer be catastrophic. Therefore, they would no longer be disasters, merely glitches, or unexpected operations within a system.

Future architecture should be an outcome of a glitch in the way that architecture, in order to be responsive, would be created using metabolized materials. A metabolized material would include any agent that undergoes some kind of altering process, known as a metabolism. The agent would react with the agency of a metabolism and produce an output, a direct result of the interactions between the input(s) and the metabolism.